


thou art past the tyrant's stroke

by artyartie



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Brunnhilde | Valkyrie (Marvel) Lives, Emotional Roller Coaster, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Loki (Marvel) Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-01 23:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14531796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artyartie/pseuds/artyartie
Summary: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun;nor the furious winter's rages,thou thy worldly task hast done,home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;golden lads and girls all must,as chimney sweepers, come to dust."- William ShakespeareWhere was Valkyrie during Infinity War? Protecting her people, honoring the dead, dealing with inappropriate munitions, and rescuing the trickster who refused to die.





	thou art past the tyrant's stroke

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I am still plugging away at the Water!Verse, but I had to take a day to write a good old-fashioned fix it after Infinity War. Okay, a kinda fix-it. I mean, there's only so cheerful it could be and comply with canon. This is going to be a stand-alone for now but I'm not completely ignoring the possibility I might want to come back and play with this world a bit more.
> 
> ****************

There’s maybe a second between the sight of the big wheel of the death and the flash of its weapons against a very flickering shield and an unsettling rumble throughout the hull.

“Get out a distress call,” Thor tells a man - Valkyrie doesn’t know his name yet, she doesn’t know many of their names - in a low, calm voice. The man responds in equal timbre, stepping quickly, though not yet running, to the nearby communications console. “Loki, man the weapons.”

“Weapons are an overstatement,” Loki quips, even as he's sliding into the firing console, hands on the trigger.  He's an ass for saying it but he's right. All they have are ion popguns that can barely handle asteroids. But it doesn’t matter, because it's all they have. “I’ll try to get us a little more time.”

Time to do what, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t have an answer, and as Valkyrie looks around, she doesn’t think anyone, even her king, does either.

***

The battle’s short, if you could even call it a battle. No matter what the man said to a universe that doesn’t seem to be answering, Asgardians are warriors, even babes in arms. When the other ship’s weapons finally tear a opening in their wall and those _things_ come through, their little band of survivors fight like they have nothing left to lose. What do they have left, besides their lives and a vague hope that this little bit of Asgard has a future?

That future doesn’t seem long now, even when Thor asks the invaders for mercy. Valkyrie wants to be angry at his words, wants to remind him mercy is a foreign word. But then she sees the haunted terror in too many eyes, and she realizes, with an ache in her heart, that for their people mercy is the only hope they have. She sees Loki silently shake his head and fix his gaze on the floor, like he already knows the answer to his brother’s question.

So she’s surprised when the freak in chief says yes, starts talking about salvation, and for one stupid second Valkyrie thinks there’s a chance.

Then the invaders sweep down the room, dividing the Asgardians cleanly, pulling bruised and bloody children out of their screaming parents’ arms and plopping them on the opposite side of their dividing line. They draw up their weapons, turn, and just like that, half the ship is in the firing line. They’re going to kill people armed with nothing but cries and pleas and tears, and Valkyrie rages forward, sword drawn and held high.

“Tell her to lower her sword, or I will be forced to make an example,” the freak in chief says, calmly, like he’s talking about intergalactic traffic patterns, and his troops are aiming their weapons at everyone now. Thor asks - no, her king orders her to put down her sword, and Valkyrie pretends she doesn’t hear his voice break. She tries to pretend, anyway.

She drops her hand, drops her sword, and it rings when it hits the deck, a steel bell clanging a warning. It keeps ringing, even when the whine of the guns drowns it out, and it’s still ringing even when the grim percussion of bodies falling to the floor stops.

***

“Don’t,” Valkyrie says. She doesn’t need her sword. Her words are sharp enough.

Korg frowns, shifts in the ship’s ridiculous seats. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t say it’s going to be alright.”

“Wasn’t gonna say it,” Korg says, sounding confused, but Korg always sounds confused. “I mean, they killed half of everybody, and they probably killed Thor and the big green guy and that guy with the weird eyes. Maybe not Thor’s brother? He’s sneaky.”

She should really be telling him to shut up. No, yelling at him to shut up, but she’s at a point beyond doing the things she should do. All she wants to do is find lots of bottles of something and drink until everything goes away.

But her king had sworn her to guard their people. Their people, crammed in this ridiculous ship, dirty and blood spattered and quiet, like they were the dead ones. Every now and then someone would sniffle, moan, or choke back a sob, and then that silence so loud she can't bear it.

“Thor’s strong. So’s Heimdall - weird eye guy - and the Hulk. And Loki’s a tricky bastard,” Valkyrie says, and she feels a bit of a smile, despite how awful and screwed up this day has been. “They’re hard to kill.”

Something flutters in her chest, and it’s not guilt or fear. It’s worse. It’s hope her king is alive, the big sweet green guy is alive, that Heimdall survived this fresh hell, and Loki had something up his sleeve. Maybe the guns didn’t get everybody.

She brings the ship around.

“Hey, you’re going back. Don’t you know that’s where that big ship was? With the bad people?” Korg at least has the sense not to try and turn the ship away.

“I know,” Valkyrie says. The people aren’t quiet. They’re rustling, murmuring, looking at her instead of staring into the distance. “It’s a rescue mission.”

***

It’s hell. It’s Helheim, all over again.

“Do ya think there’s anyone to rescue?”

Valkyrie manages to pull herself out of her chair, make her way to the ship’s airlock, wriggle into what she hopes is an EVA suit. “I don’t know,” she tells Korg, tells the people pleading at her with hands and gazes. Some of them have already started crying, but it’s better than silence.

It’s mourning. It’s grief.

Even if there isn’t anyone to save, the Asgardians can at least give their dead a better farewell than floating in space like so much junk. Maybe they don’t have flaming arrows, but this ship has fireworks, right? The exhaust from the engines? Something to make a fire bright enough the stars would be ashamed.

“It doesn’t matter,” Valkyrie says before she puts on the helmet. “They’re our people. We don’t leave them behind.”

***

Valkyrie was wrong about Heimdall.

She should have known he’d go the self-sacrificing route. Or at least that’s what she imagines as she gently pushes his body through the dark, back to the people he died for and almost died for so many times. She takes a bit of his ragged cloak and ties him, gently, to a fractured bit of hull that will have to do, for a burial boat. Her gloved hand drapes across his face, closes his golden eyes.

She gives herself a moment, then pushes off. There are so many left to find.

***

The children are small enough she can carry four of their little bodies in her arms at a time. She wishes she could find their parents. They should be together. She tries to ignore the thought that some of their parents are probably alive with no one but Korg to comfort them.

In the end, she lays the children to rest together. If they weren’t friends in this life, maybe they’ll be friends in the next.

***

There aren’t many bodies left. Valkyrie has been doing the grim math. 87 Asgardians civilians dead from the Statesman. She'd counted. 88 plus Heimdall.

She’s found 80.

Around the 50th body, she knows the Hulk escaped. Maybe he changed back, she thinks, but she would have noticed a little human without a shirt, even in the dark.

After she finds the 88th body, her knees give out. She wants to sit down but it’s space and there’s no up or down and it doesn’t matter because Thor’s alive. Her king survived, somehow. Even if Valkyrie can never revenge her people, she knows Thor will. And if Thor lived, maybe -

Valkyrie peels a piece of the deck away from what used to be part of the engine and there is body number 89.

***

She doesn’t know what happened to Loki. But the bruises around his throat mean she can imagine what happened, and she doesn’t know what’s worse: the sight of his actual body or the mental picture of how he probably died.

Her hands cup the back of his head, and his head drifts, come to rest against her helmet. “Idiot,” she whispers. “Had to go be a hero, because that’s what we do, right? Could have stayed on Sakaar. Sure, the Grandmaster’s weird but weird is better than this, right?”

Loki’s head bobs in agreement. She doesn’t even realize her hands have drifted to shake his shoulders.

“What’s a little kidnapping, am I right? No questions, not many, anyway, and lots of booze. So much booze,” Valkyrie says, tears stinging at her eyes. Tears for this stupid prince, for 89 bodies that were anything but weightless - they were full of weight, overflowing with weight she feels in her arms and her knees and her back and what’s left of her heart.  Tears for the home she found just in time to lose, to really lose it. Asgard is a lost king, a dead prince, a dead watchman, 87 dead bodies and 87 live bodies whose souls may as well be dead. “I should have stayed.”

At least then Asgard would have just been a memory, to her, and she wouldn’t have to know it was a memory to the rest of the damned universe too.

“Okay, your highness. One more disappearing act.” His face drifts against her helmet again and it’s then that she sees it. She blinks, heart beating in her throat and waits. Seconds, minutes, waits for it again, and at the edge of her hope and patience it finally comes.

A tiny, almost imperceptible, little breath of steam against the glass.

***

There’s no more birthday fireworks. There’s only the Grandmaster’s face and a crude phallic shape and a shower of spurting white sparks that leads nothing to the imagination, and that is how the Asgardians honor their dead. With orgasm fireworks. It’s tasteless and crude but it’s all they have, so in that way, it’s the most damn depressing, solemn thing she’s seen.

A day after the funeral , Loki’s breathing finally turns from barely noticeable to strained wheeze. He hasn’t blinked, hasn’t moved a finger, but he hasn’t died. It’s a pitiful victory but Valkyrie will take it.

They make for the spot the Devil’s Anus dropped them out. Sakaar isn’t perfect but Sakaar, when they left, didn’t have giant mechanical rings of hellish death. Maybe they can find a portal, to somewhere like Vanaheim, somewhere they know, somewhere they can live the rest of their traumatized lives in peace and, in her case, drunken oblivion.

The day after that, Loki’s wheeze becomes a rattling rasp. There’s enough color in his face that he’s stopped looking like a moving corpse and started looking like someone who still might die at any minute, but at least looks alive. Valkyrie’s sure the other Asgardians wish he could straddle the line between life and death a little more quietly, but she notices the way they watch him, how they hold their breath when there’s a long gap between a shaky exhale and a rattling inhale.

“I thought things with him were….weird?” Valkyrie’s curiosity finally gets the better of her that night. What she assumes is night. Not like it matters anymore.

The woman on guard laughs. It sounds like glass shattering. “Look around. This is Asgard. I think prince who is really a frost giant who tried to take over Earth but then helped save us from the dark elves and pretended to be dead, then pretended to be Odin is better than no prince and...a king who...” Her voice breaks, and the woman bows her head. "And a king who isn't here."

Loki is all the they have. He’s the royal equivalent of orgasm fireworks. He’s selfish and a coward (until he stopped being a coward when it counted)  and on this stupid little ship he’s the most solemn, regal thing there is.

***

Korg peers down at his stomach. “Something off about those little nibbles,” he says, and he turns to Valkyrie.

His hands are turning into dust and ash. “Yeah, definitely off,” he says, like it was just a stomach ache, like he wasn’t disintegrating right before his own eyes.

She opens her mouth, but instead of a scream, a thin, strangled noise is all that escapes. Korg is a layer of dust on the pilot’s console. Her chest heaves, and tries not to think that she’s breathing in little bits and pieces of him into her lungs.

Over her laboured breathing, and the sound of her heart pounding in her ears, she hears it. A chorus of wails, like the wind sweeping through a canyon. Valkyrie turns, slowly, because this has to be a nightmare and maybe she’ll wake up into the slightly more manageable nightmare she’s already living.

But no, she doesn’t wake up, and her people keep crumbling to smoke and dust all around her. She clutches at them, tries to keep them here, but skin and bone keep turning to ashes in her hands. She sinks to the cold, dusty floor, lets their ashes brush against her cheek, fill her lungs, lace her palms.

Darkness claims her quickly.

The nothingness that took her people declines.

***

The one other person who survived doesn’t wake up for another three days. Or whatever Valkyrie thinks is a day. Time doesn’t mean much when your people are blown up, shot, explosively decompressed, and turned into dust and your only company is a comatose prince and ship’s computer advising you the lubricant levels are low.

Loki wakes up in pieces. The tips of his fingers, his feet, eyelids, and then eyes. They blink open, bloodshot, and the first noise he makes is barely recognizable.

Valkyrie can sympathize. She hasn’t made many recognizable sounds the last few days.

He makes a noise she assumes means ‘where?”

“The Commodore. You’ve been out...a while.” She points to his neck, her arm brushing across the deck. She should at least get to her knees, and help her prince up, but that means moving. That means energy and will and generally caring about things. “You need better safewords,” she says, but she forgets to put the humor in it. If she even knows how, anymore.

He coughs, his entire body shaking, and Valkyrie thinks she should get him some water.

She still doesn’t move.

“W- what..” Loki coughs again and his voice is like a sword on a whetstone.

“We went back,” she says, absently, like he’d asked a competent computer, not one that had ever sex manual in the known galaxy on file. “For a rescue. You were the only one. And then the rest of them disappeared. Poof. Right into nothing. So it’s you and me and however much booze this ship has and oh, evidently not enough lube.” She smirks. “Be gentle.”

He grunts, pushes himself to his knees, shaky as a newborn foal.

“Thor-” Loki coughs, pulling himself up against the deck. “Did you-”

“He wasn’t there with the other bodies. Hulk wasn’t either.” Valkyrie groans, brings herself to her knees, then her feet. “But what does it matter? Like I said, it’s you, me, and a bunch of dust that used to be people.”

“Thanos,” Loki rasps, furious and low.

Valkyrie frowns. Maybe he didn’t come back to life right. And if the idiot is going to keep talking he needs that water. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

“He - he did this,” Loki manages to say. Valkyrie pushes a bottle of what she hopes is water into his hand. He takes it, drinks greedily until he nearly chokes. He stumbles his way to the pilot’s console.

“There’s nowhere to go. Right after-” Valkyrie closes her eyes. ‘Right after they all disappeared, that’s all I heard. Distress signals. Every ship that came in range. It happened everywhere, all at once.”

“We’re-” Loki coughs deep, but he seems to have found what he’s looking for. The ship curves into a new bearing, and the engines thrum a little louder beneath the deck. “We’re going to undo it.”

“I know you got strangled and lost in space but maybe you don’t understand,” Valkyrie said, clasping a hand on his shoulder, hard. ‘We’re two people. Even if we’re Asgardians, we can’t fight that.”

“I know,” Loki says, sympathy in his bloodshot eyes.

She wants to slap him for his pity. “So where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Where Thor would have gone. Where the people who can undo it probably are.”

“And what Norns-forsaken place is that?” Valkyrie curls her fingers into the leather beneath her palm. She feels it, again, that tiny little flutter, that spark of hope she thought the universe had ground beneath its heel. Damn him. Dying with despair and an empty bottle would be so much easier but she can't. Not yet, anyway.

“Earth.”

  
  



End file.
